2008 National Book Award Winner,
Fiction

Peter
Matthiessen

Shadow Country

Shadow Country

CITATION

Shadow Country is
an epic of American rise and descent—poetic, mythic,
devastating. From his Everglades trilogy Peter Matthiessen
has coaxed a masterpiece, a wrenching story of familial,
racial and environmental degradation stretching from
the Civil War to the Great Depression. His E.J. Watson
emerges through a dazzling array of voices as a singular
figure in our national literature, the looming personification
of manifest destiny within the dark reaches of our history.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Peter Matthiessen was born
in New York City in 1927 and had already begun his writing
career by the time he graduated from Yale University
in 1950. The following year, he was a founder of The
Paris Review. He is the author of widely acclaimed
works of fiction and non-fiction including The Snow
Leopard, which was awarded The National Book Award,
and At Play in the Fields of the Lord, which
was a National Book Award nominee. His parallel career
as a naturalist and environmental activist has produced
numerous acclaimed works of nonfiction, most of them
serialized in The New Yorker. He was elected
to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1974.

ABOUT
THE BOOK (from the publisher)

Inspired by a near-mythic event
of the wild Florida frontier at the turn of the twentieth
century, Shadow Country reimagines the legend
of the inspired Everglades sugar planter and notorious
outlaw E. J. Watson, who drives himself relentlessly
toward his own violent end at the hands of neighbors
who mostly admired him, in a killing that obsessed his
favorite son.

Shadow Country traverses
strange landscapes and frontier hinterlands inhabited
by Americans of every provenance and color, including
the black and Indian inheritors of the archaic racism
that, as Watson’s wife observed, "still casts
its shadow over the nation."

EXCERPT

HENRY SHORT

Black feller from Mist’
Watson’s showed up Saturday evening with the story.
He had escaped, he was near starved, he talked too much
out of his fear. Not wanting to pay for his mistakes,
I eased away into the dusk and Mist’ Hoad follered
me. Said I best sleep aboard Captain Williams’s
ship in case there was trouble. That black man was brought
on board right after me, they locked the two coloreds
in the same cabin for safekeeping. One man said to Mist’
Hoad, “That’s all right, ain’t it?
Both bein niggers?” Mist’ Hoad looked across
at me, see how I took that. Him and me and Mist’
Claude Storter been ?shing partners for some years,
he knew me pretty good. I shrugged to show I understood.
There weren’t nothing to be done about it.

When the white men were gone,
this feller said, “What they ?xin to do with me?”
I said, “All I know is, you best calm down and
get your story straight.” He jeered real ugly,
“Who you, boy, the pet nigger around here? That
cause you so white?”

“This ain’t no
time to go picking ?ghts,” I warned him.

“Nosir, Mr. Nigger,
it sure ain’t,” he said, his voice gone
quiet. He lay down on the ?oor, turning his back to
me.

Raised up and living all my
life in a frontier settlement where black folks were
not tolerated, I have only talked to few but I can say
I never met a black man hard as this one. Course a lot
of his anger likely come from nerves. He was scared,
all right—he’d be a crazy man not to be
scared—but he weren’t panicky.

I couldn’t sleep and
I knew this man weren’t sleeping so when he rolled
over next, I asked his name. He said that “Ed”—he
used that name!— always called him Little Joe,
which worked as good as any. From this I knew he was
a wanted man same as them others. Said he’d knew
Ed for some years but could not recall where they ?rst
met. This was a lie and he never tried to hide that:
this feller knew plenty about Mist’ Watson and
his foreman, too. He shrugged me off, saying this fool
conversation weren’t none of his idea and anyway
it weren’t my business so leave him alone. But
in a while he muttered, “Name ain’t Joe.
It’s Frank, okay?” He rolled back toward
me. “Mights well get my real name just in case
they got a nigger guestbook down in Hell showin who
passed through.”

With no way to know what might
be coming down on him in the next hours, he must have
needed somebody to hear him out, even if only just another
nigger, cause when I didn’t ask him no more questions,
he started talking on his own—not to me, not to
nobody in particular, he just wanted to get it off his
chest once and for all. Talked along in a dead voice
about the awful deeds done at the Watson place and why
he reckoned he weren’t slaughtered like them others.
All the while he spoke, he kept his face hid and his
voice low like this was a secret God Himself should
never hear.

***

Next morning when they let
me out, I turned in the cabin doorway to tell him something
but I found no words. He come forward and said quietly,
“I didn’t kill nobody, Henry. You believe
that?” When I nodded, he nodded, too. Said, “Tell
them white people my story, then. Remind ’em how
this nigger come here on his own and never had no reason
to tell lies.”

“I’ll do my best,”
I promised.

He said calmly, “Nothing
you can tell ’em gone to save my black hide, I
understand that good as you do, Henry. But knowin that
the real truth has been heard, that makes it better.
Not okay, just better.”

He stuck his hand out, cracked
a little grin. “So long, nigger,” he said.
I could not ?nd a smile to give him back. I said, “Good
luck, then, Frank,” and went away very sad and
angry. Might have been wanted, like I say, but he weren’t
all bad and he weren’t sorry for himself. It was
me was sorry. Sorry a brave man had to die so bitter.